08/01/2016

As chair of a philosophy department at a large state institution (University of Minnesota), I’ve frequently been called upon to defend philosophy and to justify its place in higher education. This has made me reflect on what really is worth preserving, celebrating, or (possibly) changing about our field. To this end I want to solicit the views of my philosophy colleagues in a more systematic way than just asking my Facebook friends, which is what drew me to the project of creating a survey.

I am now writing to ask you to participate in this (fairly short) survey: “What Matters to Philosophers”. Please click the link below to take the survey, or copy it into the location bar of your web browser:

The point of this survey is to gather your views regarding what is valuable in your academic discipline, so that we can address questions about philosophy’s future and its role in the academy on the basis of values we share as a community.

I should say that this survey is not intended to answer tactical questions about effective ways of helping philosophy to survive in difficult times; rather, I would like to know what you believe is valuable and worth preserving in academic philosophy. And so that you can feel comfortable being entirely candid in your responses, the survey is completely anonymous.

Of course, the success of this project depends on the generous contributions of time from people like you. Mindful of this, I have tried to create a survey that will not take too much of your valuable time – it should not require more than 15 minutes to complete.

Data from the survey will form the substance of my presidential address at the APA Central Division meeting in Kansas City in March 2017. Presidential addresses are published in the APA proceedings, and I hope to publish and discuss my findings in other arenas as well. I will also share the data – in a form that does not permit the identification of any individual’s responses – with the APA and with philosophy departments who are interested in it.

During the planning process for this project, some philosophers have expressed reservations about completing the survey because they do not have full time academic positions, or are still in graduate school, or are not APA members. Please be assured that there are no such restrictions on who may take the survey! It is only by hearing from as many philosophers as possible that we can get an accurate picture of what we, as a community, think about philosophy.

I greatly appreciate your assistance. Thank you.

Yours,

Valerie Tiberius

Professor and Chair

Department of Philosophy

University of Minnesota

Please take a few minutes to help Valerie collect this important data about our profession!

07/29/2016

Around a year ago, I wrote about a really beautiful study by Machery and colleagues on cross-cultural similarities in epistemic intuitions. The study looked at intuitions about Gettier cases in four different cultures and found that the Gettier intuition was remarkably robust across demographic differences.

But of course, I could imagine some readers seeing this as relatively poor evidence of cross-cultural robustness. "After all," they might say, "the Gettier intuition is one of the most fundamental aspects of our practice of knowledge attribution. Even if this one intuition turns out to be widely shared, the more subtle and complex aspects of our epistemic intuitions might easily turn out to vary across cultures."

Now, a year later, we have more information about this question. The unstoppable team of Minsun Kim and Yuan Yuan has just completed a new paper on the topic, and they provide evidence for a very surprising degree of cross-cultural robustness.

Kim and Yuan look at three different effects that have been obtained in studies on Western participants:

07/01/2016

Josh May and I are conducting a meta-analysis on judgments related to the Doctrine of Double Effect. In particular, we are interested in seeing if the byproduct/means distinction is reflected in everyday moral judgments. The classic cases that illustrate the byproduct/means distinction are the Bystander and Footbridge cases (respectively). Or course, there are many different variations on these paradigmatic cases that also involve exploring the means/byproduct distinction.

We are currently looking for unpublished studies that you may have that are relevant to this meta-analysis. We would greatly appreciate you sending us descriptive statistics or the raw data so that we could include your unpublished studies in the meta-analysis. We are only interested in unpublished studies that experimentally manipulate the means/byproduct distinction.

Unpublished studies can be crucially important for accurately estimating mean effect sizes, so your help in this endeavor would help the community interested in this distinction.

If you have any unpublished studies, or have questions, please email them to Adam Feltz (adfeltz@mtu.edu). We’ll start compiling the data we receive in two weeks (July 15th). Thanks for your help!

06/23/2016

Check out my presumptuously titled new piece in Thought! In it, I argue for several modifications to experimental philosophy's self-conception which would circumvent several prominent objections to the 'negative' project.

...at least for the 9 questions I studied for my 2013 paper, and for the 3 of those that Buckwaler and Stitch included in their widely-discussed paper on the subject. Plus: why has philosophy made so much less progress toward gender equality than the STEM disciplines have over the past two decades? I address these issues in my new article in Hypatia.

06/15/2016

Many contemporary experimental philosophers endorse a broad conception of experimental philosophy according to which one is doing experimental philosophy whenever one uses empirical methods and techniques to help investigate philosophical questions. Other experimental philosophers -- and many critics of experimental philosophy -- have assumed a narrower conception and restricted the practice to the empirical study of philosophical intuitions. Often the narrower project is further confined to folk intuitions and the aim of such studies is also narrowly focused on the evidential value of intuitions. We aim to provoke further discussion of the scope of experimental philosophy and to encourage experimental philosophers to consider how we might advance philosophical inquiry without studying intuitions.

Therefore, the Midwest Experimental and Theoretical Association invites submissions on the theme, “Beyond Intuition: Experimental Philosophy on the Broad Conception.” Submissions reporting new empirical results as well as submissions reflecting on the scope of experimental philosophy, its motivations, or the criticisms raised against it are welcome. The conference will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 7-8, 2016. Invited speakers are Carrie Figdor, Ron Mallon, Colleen Murphy, and Justin Sytsma.

To submit, please send either a paper or an extended abstract (up to 1,000 words in length) prepared for blind review AND a separate identifying title page to Ferrin McGinness at mcginne1@illinois.edu by July 15, 2016.